Welcome to the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) in Heidelberg, one of 83 institutes and research establishments of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society). The MPIK does experimental and theoretical basic research in the fields of Astroparticle Physics (crossroads of particle physics and astrophysics) and Quantum Dynamics (many-body dynamics of atoms and molecules).

Latest news

Search for Dark Matter with a novel method

According to the most current theoretical models, the hypothetical Dark-Matter particles interact with atomic nuclei. However, such interactions could not be verified to date. The scientists of the XENON collaboration now have developed novel analysis techniques to search for the first time in the data of the XENON100 detector for interactions of Dark Matter with electrons of the atomic shell. The analysis did not yield any signal above the very low background, further constraining the properties of Dark Matter. This finding is of particular importance with respect to the results of the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration. It claims the detection of a Dark-Matter signal with high significance, while the search by other experiments for interactions with atomic nuclei was not successful. A number of theoretical models which tried to explain this discrepancy assuming interaction of Dark-Matter particles with electrons are thus excluded. This will probably revive the controversy about alternative explanations of the DAMA/LIBRA signal.